Case Update (13 Feb 2025): Aarabi v. Kerroum; Father who paid for initial rent in USA and spent time with child in USA was not acquiescing to child’s relocation to USA
The parties are parents to one child, born in 2022 in Morocco. The child is a citizen of Morocco and the USA. When the child was born, his Petitioner Father was in Kuwait to serve as a translator and interpreter for a U.S. military contractor. The family lived together in Kuwait until October 2023, at which time the Father’s employer revised his contract to prohibit immediate family members from relocating to Kuwait. This caused Respondent Mother and the child to move back to Morocco. In October 2023, the parties had a dispute while in Kuwait, and it led to the parties going together to a Kuwaiti police station. The couple remained together, although living separate. Father testified that he quit his job in September 2024, with an effective end date of October 13, 2024. On September 16, 2024, Mother purchased one-way airline tickets from Casablanca to New York for the following day, in cash. She testified that the parties purchased the tickets together, but Father testified that he was unaware of the purchase, providing contemporaneous corroborating evidence of him texting his boss on September 19th, explaining he could not return immediately to work because the Mother had taken the child without his knowledge, and evidence of him emailing the U.S. Consulate in Casablanca requesting information about child abduction that same day. On September 23, 2024, he filed a petition with the Moroccan courts seeking the Mother and child’s return to the marital residence in Morocco. [Of note, on December 12, 2024, Mother filed a petition in the Moroccan courts requesting alimony].
After Mother arrived in New York, she flew to Atlanta, and stayed temporarily in different places, paid for by friends of the Father. One of these friends advised the Father that the Mother and child were in the USA, at which time the Father WhatsApp’d the Mother, told her to come back, and she refused. The Father reimbursed his friends for the cost of the accommodations, including paying for a month’s rent for a basement in one of his friend’s houses. In October 2024, Father traveled to Atlanta, and stayed with Mother and Child for a few days before returning to Morocco. Neither party paid rent for the Mother and Child beyond that initial timeframe, and the Mother and Child moved to a shelter. She then stopped allowing the Father to see the child in video chat.
The only real issue argued before the court was whether the Father consented to or acquiesced in the child’s relocation to the USA. Mother argued that the Father participated in the purchase of the plane tickets to the USA, but the contemporaneous corroborating evidence, including the court’s analysis of the Father’s mental state and the actions he took supported his argument that he was unaware of the Mother’s decision to leave Morocco and he did not consent to her removal of their child. Further, while the Father did travel to the USA briefly and spent time with the family while there, “nothing in the record evidenced an intent for [the child] to reside in the United States permanently.” The Father purchased rent for the Mother and child for only one month, “and it is reasonable to assume that he did so to prevent her from being homeless (which happened eventually anyway).”
